Presidents generally don’t like to admit mistakes, so it was interesting when Barack Obama owned up to one during an interview with Charlie Rose on CBS last summer. It was the job of the president, Obama said, to “tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism,” and it was on this score that he had fallen short. Conservatives gleefully mocked the president, saying that the country needed jobs more than it needed stories, and the remark did seem to hint at some genuine denial. After 40-plus months of high unemployment, a president who thinks his mistakes rest not in his policy choices but rather in his ability to articulate them is probably telling himself a story, if no one else.

And yet Obama’s admission resonated with his supporters, who can be forgiven for wondering why he hasn’t been better at promoting what is, by any standard, an impressive series of accomplishments. (As the comedian Chris Rock tweeted recently: “Only Pres Obama could prevent a depression, end a war, get bin Laden, bring unemployment below 8 percent, then be told he can’t run on his record.”) In books and speeches before he became president, Obama showed himself to be an evocative storyteller; even the controversy over his memoir, in which Obama condensed some characters into one, says something about his narrative sophistication, his novelistic instinct for developing themes and characters that make his point.

All of which makes it even more baffling that Obama’s presidential alter-ego, this grayer and more somber version of his literary self, spent the past four years immersed in legislative minutiae and marching out dull slogans — “an economy built to last,” “winning the future” and so on — while failing to advance any larger theory of the moment confronting the country and what it required. “They haven’t talked about how the pieces of the puzzle fit together and move us forward from where we’ve been,” says Don Baer, who served as President Clinton’s communications director and now runs the public relations giant Burson-Marsteller. “It’s been random and unconnected.” David Gergen, who advised four presidents on communications, likens the larger story of an administration to a clothesline. “You adopt your clothesline, and then you hang all your policies from it,” he told me. “They’re missing the clothesline.”

If Obama somehow manages to lose an election that seemed well within his grasp a few months ago, this question of how he squandered his narrative mojo will pain Democrats for years to come. As with so much else about this presidency, the answers can probably be traced back to those first overwhelming months after the 2008 election. Remember that John McCain’s most effective line of attack against Obama during the campaign was that he was more of a motivational speaker than a leader. And so, having won the election and facing crises on several fronts, the president’s advisers were understandably wary of too much speechifying, which might have underscored the idea that Obama was going to orate his way through the presidency while leaving the business of governing to others. As a result, Obama spent much of his first months — the period when he might have been speaking directly to an anxious public, much as Franklin Roosevelt did in a less technological age — holed up with aides and members of Congress, rather than pushing any kind of overarching narrative.

Remember, too, that Obama and Joe Biden were the first president and vice president to be elected directly from the Senate since 1960, and most of the senior aides they brought with them came from Capitol Hill. This had real consequences. Congressional aides know a lot about how to slap around their opponents, but because they’re always either taking direction from a president or trying to thwart one, they think very little about how to build support for a governing agenda. A classic case here was the controversial stimulus measure passed in the early days of Obama’s presidency; the White House and its allies skillfully managed to win approval for nearly $800 billion in aid to states, long-term investment and tax cuts, but they gave almost no thought to whether the public understood the differences between these categories of spending or the economic reasoning behind them.

A president who had governed from a statehouse, as most of Obama’s recent predecessors have done, might have grasped right away the need to take the case to the local level, repeating the same argument for investment at every ribbon-cutting ceremony the White House could find. But senators aren’t as accustomed to making that kind of sales pitch for their agendas, unless they’re campaigning for re-election, and Obama seems especially uncomfortable with it. “For a narrative to work, a president has to be extremely repetitive,” Gergen says. Obama’s obvious aversion to political theatrics and mindless repetition contributed to an impression of inconsistency (and lack of passion) that dogged him throughout his term. It was as if in the president’s determination to keep it real, he kept it confusing instead.

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You might have assumed that Obama’s imaginative campaign team, the consultants who so slickly drafted his story for 2008, would have provided the same expertise in the White House. After all, David Axelrod, one of the best political admen of his generation, accompanied his candidate to Washington and installed himself in an office not 20 feet from the boss’s. But the problem with campaign consultants who come to the White House — Karl Rove is a good example — is that they aspire to be more than campaign consultants; they always want to transform themselves into policy aides, making historic decisions and striding the halls purposefully like characters from “The West Wing.” Rather than continuing to market the Obama agenda, Axelrod traded in his video-editing software for a closetful of suits and began furiously gathering votes for legislation. The result, perhaps, was that Obama’s most talented storyteller moved on to bigger things at exactly the moment the president needed a new kind of campaign, and no one of Axelrod’s caliber filled the void.

There’s probably another reason that Obama and his most trusted advisers seemed unconcerned about advancing a sustained argument, though, which is that they decided their argument had already won. And this, more than anything, explains how the narrative really got away from the president in those early days. When I interviewed Obama during the closing weeks of the 2008 campaign — at the very moment that Congress was debating a bank bailout and the stock market was tumbling toward oblivion — he spoke about the fragile reality of his impending election and his understanding that a lot of independents and conservatives might vote for him, but they were yet to be persuaded that he shared their values and sympathized with their anxieties. This, he said, would be a central challenge for him as president.

But then Republicans collapsed under the weight of the Bush era, and Obama emerged from the election as only the fourth Democrat in history to break the 51 percent barrier, with Rooseveltian majorities in Congress and an approval rating above 70 percent. Both Obama’s campaign strategists and his former colleagues on Capitol Hill congratulated themselves on having earned a clear mandate from the voters. And suddenly the president, rather than interpreting his approval ratings as a sign that hopeful voters were waiting to hear what he had to say, seemed to proceed as if he already had the public’s enthusiastic endorsement for whatever steps he and his allies felt they needed to take.

You could have imagined, at that moment, an Oval Office address, followed by a national tour, in which the new president laid out the causes and depth of the crisis he had inherited and the measures he would take over the first 18 months of his term — short-term stimulus, long-term investment, modernization of financial regulation and the tax code — to put the country on a different course. All of these policies were probably necessary, and they were probably salable too, if Obama had seen it as one of his central responsibilities to explain how they all fit together. The president and his advisers were, to be fair, inundated with the realities of multiple crises, and so Obama forged ahead with all of these policy solutions (not to mention a massive health care plan and what amounted to the temporary nationalization of the car companies), which, absent any real marshaling of public opinion, emboldened his opponents and caught much of the country by surprise.

It was a crucial misreading of the moment, and if Obama narrowly loses, it will most likely be the moment he wishes he had back. If he wins a second term, however, then the president, who has laid out no clearer policy agenda this time than he did four years ago, will have the opportunity — the imperative, really — to learn from the one mistake he has been willing to acknowledge. In this era of elections that teeter on the votes of a handful of states, of campaigns characterized by waxy clichés but very little courageous explanation, an election result isn’t a final verdict on one governing philosophy over another, but rather a signal that the voters have agreed to hear your case. Once you’re in office, the story you tell about and to the country isn’t some barely tolerable performance that distracts you from the job of being president. It is, to a large extent, the presidency itself.

Matt Bai is the magazine’s chief political correspondent. He last wrote about the economy in Ohio.

A version of this article appears in print on November 4, 2012, on Page MM16 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Still Waiting for the Narrator in Chief. Today's Paper|Subscribe